The gong show started early

The gong show on Saturdays at Canyon Meadows pool reliably starts about 8am. The serious swimmers know this and are waiting for the doors to open at 7. Today there were 5 of us, plus some other floaties. I see the two guys often. They take over a lane and do some pretty tough sets. I know better than to try to share a lane with them, but I think today was a rest day for them. The two girls are rockets, both swimming much faster than me. For a few minutes I thought one of them was Julie. We all got in and started with no nonsense.

I had a lane to myself till the end of warm up and a guy joined me. We split the lane and carried on. I had two sets of 4 x 150 m as a main set. Midway through the second set, as I'm pushing off the wall, a girl with fins on tried to cut me off. No idea where she came from. I swam over her and finished that 150 as she floundered back and forth. Then I gave her a lecture about telling the people in the lane about joining in, and making sure everybody knows we're swimming in a circle now. She was brutally slow, even with the fins. I think she's the first of the resolutionistas for this year. I wasn't expecting them until Monday.

The first one in each set was 2:40, the rest were 2:45 or maybe a couple seconds quicker at most. The plan was to start on 2:45, but I revised that to starting on 3:00. That worked pretty well. Swam a few additional laps thinking about form and working on my turn to bring it up to an hour. Overall the swim is pretty good again, though I still need to work on surfacing after flip turns. That is sooo not graceful, or smooth. At this point my open turns are still faster than my flip turns. No surprise, I've only done a few hundred flip turns, and I've done a bazillion open turns.

As I was getting out of the pool the gong show was well under way. The fast girl was still doing her thing and somehow had convinced everybody to stay out of her half lane. I suspect my inner shark was hanging out with her, and maybe that was why. Other than her, the pool was filled with people that swim so badly it hurt my eyes to watch. I went upstairs for the machine of truth and found more gong show in the weight and cardio room. Two people were arguing in Cantonese over one of the machines; it sounded like murder was only a few seconds away. My number is 231, which considering it's Christmas and a rest week, isn't as bad as I thought it would be.

At 11am the weather page said -17 C (2 F) with a wind chill of -23. I ended up over dressing a bit since the sun had come out and there was no wind till near the half way point. Walked briskly then jogged very slowly for 10 minutes to the start of the path to Glenmore Reservoir, then ran an hour, trying to stay at the bottom end of zone 3. It drifted up a bit while going up some hills on the way back. I got as far as the Outfall Duct 21, not quite 100 m from where the path splits near the kids playground area. At the end I had to do a really slow jog for 2 minutes to get back to the starting point. Walked 15 minutes home, stretched 15 minutes.

I'm quite pleased by this. My run felt good and smooth. It's only during the walk at the very end that my left calf started complaining a bit. So it seems (cautiously) that T Rex has moved on. Let's hope he finds someone else he likes better than me, and preferably not anybody I know.